Articles

You can, of course, ignore war. You can act like you don’t notice it, like it doesn’t affect you. You can stubbornly avoid looking in its direction. But then, ostentatiously ignoring it is also taking a stance, and not always a productive one.

Expressions of solidarity with refugees can conceal essentialism and condescension based on citizenship, class and religion. Governments’ flagrant neglect of responsibilities entailed by use of the ‘we’ reveals the aporias of a solidarity founded in national belonging, argues Suzana Milevska.

Controversies over Muslims refusing to shake hands with non-Muslims are typical of the conflicts affecting today’s multi-religious societies. Appeals to the law are not the answer: processes of social self-regulation need to take their course beyond formal authority, argues Miloš Vec.

The enfranchisement of migrants can overcome the democratic deficit, however ethno-nationalism’s xenophobic understanding of the political community requires a political, not a legal solution, argues social anthropologist Shalini Randeria.

Solidarity in liberal democracies is pluralistic, argues political scientist Ira Katznelson; it allows particularities of time and place while satisfying a widely held human interest. Democracy, too, takes a variety of forms and is best measured by historical standards.

There are few places where the new East-West conflict can be observed so clearly as in Kyiv. The weapons are money, networks and propaganda, writes Harald Neuber. He reports on the silent battle for hearts and minds that’s carried out in public but orchestrated from behind the scenes.

The far Right continues to capitalize on the extremes of the conflict in eastern Ukraine and the country’s deepening economic crisis, writes Kostas Zafeiropoulos, even as key elements at this end of the political spectrum regroup.

The real costs of increasing social inequality are plain for all to see in Ukraine, and not least in Kyiv’s superblocks. But here too, there is a resilience that has to be seen to be believed. Not content with TV reports and YouTube clips, Adeline Marquis pays one such superblock a visit.

Russian hackers were able to interfere in the US election because of public receptivity to anti-establishment messages. Investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan argue that distrust in traditional media provides fertile ground for Russian disinformation.

One of the legacies of the Maidan in Kyiv is a subcultural revolution that retains its momentum to this day, albeit under increasingly precarious circumstances. Luigi Spinola talks to the DJs, entrepreneurs and politicians who know the scene best.

The migration crisis has triggered a shift in politics away from an ethics of ultimate ends to an ethic of responsibility, the question of the ‘we’ to whom we owe solidarity reappearing in pre-political concepts like ethnicity and national culture.

In a ‘flat world’ there is no longer a place for the sovereign right of national ‘non-inteference’, argues Ulrike Guérot. Europe must begin thinking about ‘network democracy’, in which social cohesion is organized beyond borders.

In a new economy, the contours of which we are only beginning to grasp – post-industrial, post-scarcity, post-work – what might the state look like? How will a society of people who do not “go to work” in a twentieth-century sense be governed? Are we in for a “new socialism” or for the dissolution of the traditional nation-state, and are these two scenarios really different? What will happen to those who do not fit into this brave new world?

Every generation of Ukrainians is confronted anew with the country’s historical traumas. However, Ricardo Dudda reports on the dangers of the past distracting reformers’ attention away from Ukraine’s future, especially where Russian propaganda seeks to distort the historical record.

Sloviansk is a grey city in eastern Ukraine. This was already the case, before pro-Russian separatists occupied it and the Ukrainian army brought it back under Kyiv’s control. But young people are now attempting to add some splashes of colour to the wasteland, not far from the frontline. And not only with paintbrushes. Above all, they want to change people’s mentality.

Ukraine was ranked 107th out of 180 countries in this year’s World Press Freedom Index. An improvement on 2015, but still indicative of the serious threats that the country’s journalists face. Cecilia Ferrara takes stock of recent developments in the new media landscape.